“You ought to be!” Dick declared, thoroughly disgusted at the fellow’s cowardice. “You blubbering baby, you ought to be hanged! But you’re not gone yet, if you have the heart of a mouse. Do you see that door on the opposite side of the car? I don’t know where it leads to, but you do. Open that door, if you’re a man, and disappear in the darkness.” CHAPTER VIII. A VOYAGE TO PORTO RICO. “No, no!” the lieutenant moaned; “I can’t do it; I can’t do it! It’s all up with poor Comacho.” He put his head down again and burst into another flood of tears. His wife threw her arms around his neck and wept hysterically; and to complete the picture the baby began to cry. The first warning bell gave notice that in another minute the train would start. “If you are determined to do nothing for yourself, Comacho,” Dick said, “I will stay behind with you if I can be of any assistance.” “No,” Comacho moaned, “leave me to my fate; I am past help. If you will go on with my wife and child to the capital, it will be the greatest favor you can do me. Here, take the ulster and cap; they are no use to me now.” Pulling off the heavy coat and giving a last embrace to his wife and baby, the bold lieutenant stepped out of the compartment and gave himself up to the officer, and at that moment the last bell tapped and the train moved off. Dick was in anything but a comfortable situation, with an all-night’s ride before him with the hysterical young woman and the crying baby; but he looked upon it as a valuable experience, worth a column or two sometime, perhaps, as a phase of Mexican life. “It was rather stretching a point,” he reflected, “to try to help the fellow escape. If he had been a criminal, of course I shouldn’t have done it; or even if there had been any regular charge against him; but a mere suspicion of a slight political offence is different. However, there’s no use trying to help such a fellow as that. Why, an American boy ten years old would have more grit.” The train had not gone far before Dick found himself holding the baby, in an awkward fashion enough; and in an hour or two both mother and child were asleep. He did not know that the darkness was hiding from him some of the grandest scenery on the continent; snow-capped mountain peaks, and vast plains thousands of feet below, with their scores of little cities, with burnished domes and spires on their cathedrals. He did not even know, shut up in the close compartment, that when the train reached the foot of the mountain the ordinary engine was exchanged for a great double-headed locomotive, with two smokestacks and two engineers. He did know, however, that between midnight and daylight the air was unpleasantly cold; and he was not at all sorry when at eight o’clock in the morning the train drew into the great station in the city of Mexico.